In the preparation of a large bird, in particular a turkey, for sale it is standard to cut the bird up after slaughter into several pieces. With a turkey it is standard to clean the bird by removing the viscera and then rinsing the animal. Then the animal is hung from a conveyor chain which moves it through a plurality of stations at which pieces are cut off it, it is deboned, and so on. Clearly this process requires a substantial amount of manual work and has the considerable disadvantage that the quality of the end product depends directly on the abilities of the people doing the various steps. Furthermore a normally significant amount of meat is left hanging on the carcass or lodged in cavities thereof. One of the standard operations is the removal of the neck from the bird, as this piece has relatively little meat and is normally applied only to the lowest uses. Thus this neck is cut off in a first stage at a location as low as possible on the animal, that is at the joint of the wings and the coracoids. This leaves the carcass frequently with a neck stub which reduces the value of the bird.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,656,692 describes an apparatus which holds a gutted animal body, typically a bird, to move it through the various stations in a meat-packing plant. The body is held in a fairly stable position so that removal of wings and legs and stripping of meat is much easier than in the prior-art system in which the bird is suspended by its head or neck. Since the neck is not used in this apparatus it is advantageous to remove it as the first step in processing the cleaned and gutted body.